Undernews is the online report of the Progressive Review, edited by Sam Smith, who has covered Washington under nine presidents and edited alternative journals since 1964. The Review is an online journal and archive of alternative news. It has been on the web since 1995. See main page for full contents

Monday, July 30, 2007

SEPARATING CHURCH AND REALITY

The mythological miasma in which America finds itself and its inability to face reality or use common sense has many contributing sources including advertising and propaganda, the entertainment industry, endless military fantasies and an intelligentsia that can't distinguish between theory and fact.

But America's denial of the real is also being fueled by a media driven conviction that faith is a superior route to the truth than evidence, history or experience,

As a result, the religions that are soaring in the public's mind are those that extend faith's turf beyond matters unknown or unprovable in the secular world and that treat spiritual conviction as a more than adequate substitute for reason, empirical analysis or scientific conclusions.

The great irony is that this is happening even as we loudly and repeatedly declare our major enemies to be those who have taken precisely the same approach towards their own Muslim faith.

This is not to say there is no place for faith, but only to accept the dictionary definition that faith is a "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." Such a belief can fairly exist only when proof and evidence are unattainable and not when they are plainly visible on each night's evening news.

As a one-time anthropology major, I am far less hostile to faith - including religious faith - than many of my cynical ilk. Once, while visiting Italy, I found myself staying in a room with a picture of the Pope over the bed. My reaction was a multicultural truce; I simply removed the picture after the house cleaner had left and put it back before she returned the next morning. I have also left the mezuzah on the front doorjam of the house we bought some years ago just to be on the safe side.

I know of no culture and no time that has done without faith. Journalists, for example, put almost religious faith in what they call objectivity. And even Einstein had a horseshoe over his door, explaining to a friend that while he did not believe in it, "they tell me it works."

The fair use of faith fills the gaps of human knowledge with beliefs that help people keep going without harming others. These beliefs can create wonderful children or they can deny them needed medicines. They can create honorable, caring people and communities or they can lead to wars and cruel prejudice.

Without some form of faith, many humans easily become depressed, anti-social, confused, immoral or suicidal. Faith may be no more than a natural form of Prozac, but if it works for the individual and doesn't hurt the believer or others, it's a respectable way to get through life.

It is also true - and overwhelmingly ignored by the media and politicians - that religious belief is only one variety of faith. The poker player can have a completely secular form of faith as can the basketball player or hard working individuals whose faith is based on the effort they have expended. People can be guided by deep faith in their family, community, nation, moral standards, teachings and philosophies, art or music. And one of the most common forms of faith among politicians is in themselves rather than in the God of whom they speak so often. Restricting faith to its religious manifestations thus is one more way the media has trivialized and distorted the topic.

The media has also widely accepted the notion that there are identifiable "people of faith" - again meaning only explicitly expressed religious faith. These people supposedly stand taller because of their belief in a certain God. And the media accepts without argument that having faith is more important than witnessing it, an assumption that gives the fundamentalist religions a leg up, say, on activist Jews and Presbyterians or Catholic practitioners of liberation theology. In short, the media has been suckered into a trite and provincial definition of faith useful primarily to slimy politicians and evangelical hustlers.

A recent example of this toadying to certain religious assumptions was a recent Anderson Cooper show that included the following:

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Sometime between the last campaign and this one, the Democratic Party woke up and saw the light. . .

MARA VANDERSLICE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: It was almost like it was a joke, that you couldn't be a Christian and be a Democrat.

KAYE: These days, she's on the vanguard of Democrats' expanding effort to connect with people of faith. The reason? A big God gap between the parties.

A big God gap between Democrats and Republicans? It's hard to have more biased media coverage than that.

In fact, the NY Times recently published a statistical analysis of how the God gap has actually changed in the Congress over the past forty years. Here is the real politics of religion as it has played out in a body supposedly equal to the White House in power. In Congress, between 1964 and 2006:

Roman Catholics have increased 46Jews have increased 26Baptists have increased 12All others have increased 12Mormons have increased 5Lutherans have stayed the sameUnited Church of Christ have declined 17Episcopalians have declined 31Presbyterians have declined 32Methodists have declined 33

When was the last time you heard any media discussion of the increase in Catholic or Jewish power in Congress? Or that the off-beat and non-believers are doing as well as the Baptists?

Now take a look at the Supreme Court. Five of the nine justices are Catholic, two are Jewish and the other two are Protestant. There are no Southern Baptists on the court. The Catholics on the court represent 45% of all Catholics ever to sit there, again suggesting that the topic deserves at least as much attention from the press as does pimping for Protestant preachers of the evangelical right.

The media's faith fraud adds to a fantasy that the only things that matter politically are those that don't matter in real life. Loudly speculate on what's going to happen after you die and you will get far better coverage than knowing what to do in Iraq or with the economy next month.

As for the politicians, whether it is the sanctimonious pomposity of Obama or the sleazy hypocrisy of Clinton, it is hard to see why any sane religious person would fall for such cynical professions of belief. In fact those raised deeply in a faith usually don't talk about it all that much. John Edwards, for example, has been far more restrained on the topic than the two front-runners.

Asked about gay marriage, Edwards mentioned his personal reservations but added that it was "absolutely wrong as president to use faith to deny anyone their rights and I will not do that when I'm president." Alone among the major candidates, Edwards seems to understand the line between faith and reality. Obama and Clinton, on the other hand, are perfectly willing to trade the latter for the former whenever it looks like it'll add a few more votes.

It is the line between religious faith and reason - not the line between religious faith and non-belief - that ultimately matters. The question is not one's faith but whether it is used to override, ignore or pervert the facts and whether it is used to help or hurt others. We have had more than enough pain and suffering due to the abusive application of faith substituting for reason and decency. What this country needs now is not more people of faith but more people of reality and common sense. Especially among those running for office

I don't understand how you come to your characterization of Sam's views towards Edwards. From what I read, Sam seems of the opinion that Edwards is the least putrid patch on a steaming dungheap - at least according to Sam's personal priorities.

True, he calls out the BS of Hillary and Obama more than Edwards, but mainly because they are spreading more of it around.

I think they all need more criticism from the left. It will help keep them honest and will serve as a pre-test for the general election - pretty-much the exact intent of the primary.

So if you can't abide by Sam's grudging preference for Edwards over two of the most cynical and self-serving politicians to come along since the "Big Dog" crapped all over our collective carpet, then you are probably part of the problem.

Sam wrote: Alone among the major candidates, Edwards seems to understand the line between faith and reality.

What makes someone a "major candidate" per the corporatocracy, which is evidently the definition Sam is using here? ("Evidently" because otherwise he'd be talking about Kucinich, who is a major candidate by any rational definition)

Answer: lots of money, implicit support of the essential status quo (whether queers can marry is not part of that; whether the money and power remain concentrated, is), and enough charisma to baffle the people with BS.

Yet Sam rightly speaks out against the continuing degradation of our social fabric, which is due in no small part to the acceptance of political lesser-evilism, which support for Edwards exemplifies.

As long as we're getting off-topic, I can't speak for our editor, but I would call John Edwards a major candidate for the following reasons:1. He consistently polls in the top three of the Democratic hopefuls and leads in some states.2. He has experience serving in the Senate.3. He was the Democrats' nominee for vice president in 2004.I don't agree with every bit of Edwards' campaign message or expect him to be our savior, but I still think he's a front-runner and therefore a "major" candidate.

He polls in the top three because he gets lots of favorable press. And he gets lots of favorable press because he has shown himself to be, like Obama and Hilary, a "safe" candidate who will never threaten those in power.

His entire experience in elective office is his one term in the Senate. During which he was a "moderate", which is the current euphemism for a rightwinger. His most important accomplishment was to be, if you believe him, deceived by an addled ex-drug abuser, and serial failure whom any competent lawyer -and by all accounts Edwards is a very competent lawyer- should have spotted as a psychopath. Millions of ordinary non-privileged people around the world were not deceived by the WMD lies, but Edwards was deceived. He says. If he's telling the truth, he was amazingly stupid for a person of his professional background. If not, he's shown himself willing to kill other people for money, as long as it's by proxy.

He was chosen to be the VP candidate by someone who went on to show himself to be a consummate incompetent (or betrayer, take your choice), who was responsible for the (first ever, I believe) suppression of free speech at the Dem convention, who then campaigned with all the energy of a dishrag, and who finished up by pre-emptively surrendering before the votes were even counted.

It seems fairly clear that Edwards is a "major candidate" only among those who are guided by the corporatocracy. It's inexplicable to find Sam among that number.

Your editor has been a
musician for many decades. He started the first band his Quaker
school ever had and played drums with bands up until 1980 when
he switched to stride piano. He had his own band until the mid-1990s
and has played with the New Sunshine Jazz Band, Hill City Jazz
Band, Not So Modern Jazz Band and the Phoenix Jazz Band.

APEX BLUESSam
playing with the Phoenix Jazz Band at the Central Ohio Jazz festival
in 1990. Joining the band is George James on sax. James, then
84, had been a member of the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller
orchestras and hadappeared on some 60 records.More
notes on James